The Gardens of William Trevor : Myths in the Making Marie Mianowski To cite this version: Marie Mianowski. The Gardens of William Trevor : Myths in the Making. PUR-editions. Le Jardin et ses mythes aux Etats-Unis et en Grande Bretagne, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017, 978-2- 7535-5901-1. hal-01874260 HAL Id: hal-01874260 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01874260 Submitted on 19 Nov 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The Gardens of William Trevor: Myths in the Making Marie MIANOWSKI (Université de Nantes, CRINI) 1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3And God said, « Let there be light, » and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (…) 6And God said, « Let there be an expanse a in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. » 7And God made b the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8And God called the expanse Heaven. c And there was evening and there was morning, the second day1. In ancient tales and myths of creation of all origins, whether Biblical, Coranic or Asian, myths of creation go along myths of separation between the sky and the earth. And like the Garden of Eden, all gardens are born of this separation. How should the gardens in William Trevor’s work be apprehended in the context of Irish history and the social evolution of his native country? While they are linked to the myths of creation and separation, gardens help the characters accept change and the passing of time, in so far as they themselves become active and responsible partners in the never-ending process of creation. Through his works of art, the artist, whether writer, poet, painter, sculptor or photographer, embodies the Great Architect and as such sublimes and transcends reality in becoming a creator himself. Irish by birth, William Trevor was born as Trevor Cox in county Cork in Ireland in 1928. He grew up in Ireland in the first years of the civil war and the aftermath of partition until he exiled himself to England, in south Devon, where he has been living, writing and gardening since the late 1950’s. Two elements in Trevor’s biography have strongly influenced his relationship to artistic creation and hence to creation in general. The first element is that William Trevor started as a sculptor. He worked under the name of Trevor Cox as a successful wood carver and sometimes stone and metal sculptor for a number of years. He then stopped working as a sculptor and turned instead to writing short stories when he decided that his art as a sculptor had become too abstract and he missed creating characters. But what remains of his skill as a sculptor in his craft as a fiction writer, is a specific mode of creation that closely links creation, separation and destruction. The second significant biographical element is William Trevor’s choice to exile himself to England so that he could write about Ireland. William Trevor’s work of creation is therefore associated to destruction and separation in more than one sense. 1 The Bible, Genesis 1, 1-8, http://esv.scripturetext.com/genesis/1.htm, consulted on November 16th 2012. The first section of this presentation will focus on the myth of the Garden of Eden as an eternal paradise and will examine the links between creation and destruction. In 2002, Homan Potterton wrote an article about William Trevor’s sculptures entitled: ‘Suggestions of concavity: William Trevor as a sculptor2’, enlightening Trevor’s work as he carved and threw away the chips until he reached ‘the raw material’. The word ‘concavity’ is also telling of the way in which caved-in, chiselled-away volumes are left to the viewer’s or the reader’s imagination. The last section will therefore present how artistic creation can be read in Trevor’s work as a metaphor of cosmic and divine creation and how gardens enable Trevor to present history as both synchronic and diachronic, as Giorgio Agamben develops in his thesis on what is contemporary3. Trevor’s gardens illustrate what Agamben describes as the definition of historicity: the discontinuity of language and the discontinuity of time. 1. Gates, hedges and bridges: the myth of the Garden of Eden Words are as old as myths: the word ‘paradise’ comes from the Greek paradeisos, coined after the Persian pardez meaning enclosure. The word garden itself comes from a Gallo-Roman root, with the Latin hortus and the Gallic gart which also means enclosure. Gardens are therefore secluded islets separated from the rest of the world and the rest of nature. In the context of Irish history in which William Trevor writes, separation is all the more central as it also refers to the partition of Ireland which occurred a few years before he was born and broke out into a civil war he experienced during all his childhood. He came of age as the Republic was institutionally created. Therefore the separation between north and south or between Protestants and Catholics is one that moulded Trevor’s vision of the world and became a recurrent theme in his fiction. Another form of separation is the experience of exile. Trevor left Ireland in the fifties as millions of other Irish men and women before him. Those two aspects of separation, partition and exile are clearly visible through one of Trevor’s recurrent sources of inspiration: the Anglo-Irish Big House and its garden and surroundings. Coming from an Anglo-Irish background, the world of Big Houses and of the dwindling power of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency was a world Trevor knew very well and which is often at the centre of his narratives. In this context, gardens are large enclosed expanses of land tended by hired gardeners. The Big Houses that William Trevor witnessed 2 Homan Potterton, ‘Suggestions of Concavity: William Trevor as a sculptor’ in Irish Arts Review, 2002, http://irishartsreview.com/irisartsreviyear/pdf/2002/25488313.pdf.bannered.pdf, last consulted on November 16th 2012. 3 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus ? and other Essays, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009. had been declining for some years and the motif of the ruin is central to most of the landscapes he describes. Over the centuries however, those Big Houses had become the setting of a life quite different by its standards, to the life of those who lived outside its walls and gates. Big Houses and their gardens display a tightly partitioned world of hedges and avenues, very much on the model of 18th-century English gardens, with a gate-lodge, a pond or a lake, an orchard and a kitchen garden. In Trevor’s narratives, the Big Houses and their gardens symbolize seclusion and secrecy but also continuity, as is visible for example, in two of his novels, The Silence in the Garden, published in 1990 and The Story of Lucy Gault, published in 2003. In The Silence in the Garden, the garden attached to the Big House of the Rolleston family is planted on an island which, until the time around which the whole narrative hinges, has been separated from the mainland and the rest of the village. The place, house and garden, is called Carriglas and the narrative focuses on a specific year in the life of the Rolleston family: 1931. In 1931, the youngest daughter Villana is against all odds about to marry the old family solicitor and that year also a bridge is being built between the island-garden and the rest of the village. All along the novel, the garden is described as an unchanging place. Generations of children have played among the strawberry trees, the rhododendrons and the monkey puzzle and run down its avenues while history skimmed by. Arriving at Carriglas is a mythical experience in itself: The high white gates which Hugh had anticipated for me stood open at the head of a sunless avenue, with a gate-lodge on the left. Moss and cropped grass softened the surface beneath the horse’s hooves, making our journey eerily soundless. Beech trees curved their branches overhead. The shiny leaves of rhododendrons were part of a pervading greenness4’. Carriglas is a land of plenty and leisure which would seem a paradise on earth to any visitor: ‘We crossed the cobbled yard, Villana leading me to an ice-house and then through a shrubbery to the kitchen garden, where peaches ripened on brick-lined walls. We passed apple-trees to a secluded tennis-court and continued on a path that skirted the grounds, eventually arriving at an inlet where the island’s river flowed into the sea.